Walmart once famously hyped its “low price guarantee,” showcasing how the retailer’s scale helped customers save money. Now, in a push to cut its own costs, Walmart is 3D printing its stores.
For the last two years, contractors working for Walmart have used 3D-printed construction at a handful of sites across the U.S. The walls for five additions to existing stores in Tennessee, Missouri, Alabama, and Arkansas have been completed in this fashion so far. It’s the country’s largest deployment of 3D-printed architecture in the commercial sector. The retailer’s scale is catalyzing the growth and adoption of the technology, which promises to construct buildings faster and more affordably.
Digital fabrication meets big-box stores
The use of 3D printing for construction has mostly focused on residential structures, owing to their smaller size and the nascent state of the technology. Expanding 3D printing to the commercial sector could help scale up the industry. Meanwhile, completing larger structures with bigger budgets could help prove the utility of the process—and even help bend the cost curve.
To complete its 3D-printed builds, Walmart partnered with Alquist, the maker of robotic A1X 3D printers, and FMGI, a longtime contractor of the Arkansas-based retail giant. (Walmart declined the opportunity to comment on this story.)
“This is what keeps me excited,” says Darin Ross, the president and CEO of FMGI, which is based in Woodstock, Georgia. He founded his company in his basement and as it grew into a nationwide firm, he eagerly awaited more innovation. “For 30 years, I’ve watched the construction industry just do it the same way over and over,” he says. “We as an industry are way behind in adopting new technology and new ways of doing things.”
FMGI is trained to operate Alquist’s 3D printers—which pipe layers of a concrete composite, like toothpaste being squeezed from a tube—and recently agreed to expand an existing arrangement with Walmart to 3D print buildings. This includes full-scale buildings and 30-plus projects in the pipeline through 2027.
The partnership started with a pilot build at Walmart’s Athens, Tennessee, location in September 2024. Alquist printers laid out the walls for an 8,000-square-foot, 20-foot-high expansion of the superstore. The additional area helped the store to better accommodate increased pickup and delivery traffic. At that time, it was the largest 3D-printed commercial structure in the United States.
From traditional methods to 3D printing
FMGI has a long history working in the retail and big-box world. It has completed remodels and new buildings for Home Depot, Trader Joe’s, Aldi, and Publix. As a general contractor for Walmart, it has worked on everything from neighborhood stores to building drone nests for new delivery methods.
The company had initially secured the Athens contract with Walmart as a standard masonry build, but the retailer switched gears and informed FMGI that it wanted to try to 3D print the expansion. As Ross says, “our job is to do what the customer wants.”
The process had a steep learning curve. It involved figuring out how to use the rail-mounted robot printer, which extrudes inch-thick layers of special concrete mixed with fibers to avoid cracks while curing. It took 40 days to figure out how to print the expansion’s 20-foot-tall walls, including mastering the new system. FMGI also had to resubmit plans to the city to get approval to use this new method. But the hurdles were all teachable moments. The buildout for FMGI’s next Walmart 3D print job—at a store in Huntsville, Alabama, completed in late February in 2025—took just a week. This was substantial time savings.
“I saw the robot print the walls, and the speed and accuracy in which they were doing it,” says Ross. “The light bulb went on.” FMGI now owns four of Alquist’s robotic rigs, which cost an average of just under $300,000 each.
Time and cost savings
FMGI says these projects cut production time by a third—allowing the retailer to open and start selling that much quicker—and lower construction costs by 15%.
The technique still faces challenges. As in conventional construction, weather is an issue: The water-and-concrete mix sent through the robotic arm and dispenser needs to be kept below 91 degrees and above freezing to avoid jamming or melting.
On the Athens job, where they worked with an earlier iteration of the printer, the heat was a sweltering 110 degrees. Ross recalls blowing the hoses that carry the concrete mix to the nozzle due to poor temperature regulation; workers later added ice to the machine to cool it down and ran prints at night. Additionally, severe winds can cause the machine to be unsteady and unable to lay precise lines of the concrete composite. But, as Ross argues, the tradeoffs are much better than having a dozen masons on a scaffold freezing or overheating.
Advanced technology also helps recruit workers, says Ross. It’s a valuable asset at a time when the construction industry suffers from a long-term labor shortage. Ross says convincing young people to take a position at FMGI becomes much easier when they see a future with robotics as opposed to just manual labor.
More buildings coming online soon
The next round of FMGI/Alquist projects for Walmart will mostly be standalone fuel stations, as well as more additions to support online pickup and delivery. Ross says they’re also in final negotiations to build a 50,000-square-foot grocery store from Walmart with this technology, which would be the largest 3D-printed building in the world.
Other construction firms and retailers are watching what Walmart is doing, and are poised to follow. “With Walmart being the leader of the retail industry, a lot of people will adopt after Walmart figures it out,” he says.